KINGSTON, Jamaica. Ask what the most valuable resource in Jamaican construction is and most people will say land. The better answer may be the material poured on top of it. Every block, every slab, every kilometre of road begins as sand, gravel and crushed stone, and sand is now among the most fought over commodities on earth: dredged from seabeds, smuggled across borders, stolen from beaches and, in parts of India, killed for.
The United Nations Environment Programme puts global use of sand and gravel at about 50 billion tonnes a year, roughly 17 kilograms for every person alive, every day. UNEP says sand and gravel are the largest volume of solid material extracted globally, and until recently almost nobody counted them. A separate UNEP platform, Marine Sand Watch, estimates that about 6 billion tonnes a year are dredged from the world’s seas, the equivalent, it says, of more than a million dump trucks a day.
In September Jamaica’s Auditor General told Parliament that the agency licensing the island’s quarries had four inspectors for between 231 and 277 licensed quarries, could not confirm that enforcement was consistently pursued in 14 of 15 recorded illegal quarrying complaints, and had not used its security deposit mechanism during the review period. About six weeks later the Prime Minister created a separate Ministry of Mining and Geology.
The resource nobody counted
Sand looks infinite, and in one sense it is. The United States Geological Survey states plainly that sand and gravel resources are plentiful throughout the world. The difficulty is that the useful kind sits in particular places. Concrete needs angular, washed grains of the right size, which rivers, lakes and coastlines produce by slow erosion over very long periods. Desert sand, its grains rounded smooth by wind, is generally considered poorly suited to standard concrete, which is one reason Gulf states have imported sand and relied on crushed rock.
Demand has risen far faster than nature replaces it. At the UNEP report launch in Geneva in 2022, the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment noted that extraction had grown about fivefold in fifty years, and Pascal Peduzzi of UNEP’s GRID Geneva centre called it absurd that the most extracted material in the world was not tracked. UNEP says marine dredging is approaching the 10 to 16 billion tonnes a year that rivers need to replenish coasts.
In 2025 the United States produced about 870 million tonnes of construction sand and gravel from roughly 6,500 pits, plus about 1.5 billion tonnes of crushed stone from some 3,500 quarries, according to the USGS. That works out to around 7 tonnes of aggregate per American per year, or about 19 kilograms a day, on a population of roughly 340 million.
Cement: the league table that tracks the sand
No reliable country ranking of sand use exists, because most governments publish none. The best proxy is cement: each tonne is mixed with several tonnes of sand and stone to make concrete, so where cement goes, aggregate follows.
| Rank | Country | Cement, Mt | Share of world |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 1,700 | 44.7% |
| 2 | India | 470 | 12.4% |
| 3 | Vietnam | 100 | 2.6% |
| 4 | Turkey | 89 | 2.3% |
| 5 | United States | 84 | 2.2% |
| 6 | Iran | 68 | 1.8% |
| 7 | Brazil | 67 | 1.8% |
| 8 | Egypt | 64 | 1.7% |
| 9 | Indonesia | 64 | 1.7% |
| 10 | Russia | 59 | 1.6% |
| 11 | Saudi Arabia | 54 | 1.4% |
| 12 | Japan | 44 | 1.2% |
| 13 | Mexico | 42 | 1.1% |
| 14 | South Korea | 37 | 1.0% |
| Jamaica (2023) | 1.15 | 0.03% |
China’s estimated 1.7 billion tonnes of cement in 2025 was about 45 per cent of world output, according to the USGS, and roughly 1,500 times Jamaica’s supply of about 1.15 million tonnes recorded by the Mines and Geology Division for 2023. Vietnam, third on the list, is one of the countries where the consequences are most visible: its delta is being mined to build its cities.
Where the sand runs out first
A 2023 sand budget for the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, produced for WWF, estimated that 35 to 55 million cubic metres of sand are taken from the delta’s riverbeds each year, against a remaining exploitable stock of up to 550 million cubic metres. At that rate, the authors said, the delta could run out of minable sand around 2035. Upstream dams compound the problem.
Singapore shows what money can do when local sand is gone. The city state grew from 581.5 square kilometres in 1960 to 725.7 in 2019, about a quarter larger, largely on reclaimed land, and the government targets 766 by 2030. A 2019 UNEP report described it as the world’s largest sand importer over two decades, bringing in an estimated 517 million tonnes. Its suppliers then shut the door one by one: Indonesia, which once provided 90 per cent of Singapore’s sand, banned exports in 2007; Cambodia banned sand exports in 2017 and Malaysia banned sea sand exports in 2018. Indonesia reopened sea sand exports in 2024. Singapore’s answer has been stockpiles, empoldering, which reclaims land behind a sea wall and needs less sand, and buying further afield.
The human cost
In India, the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a research group that compiles media reports, counted at least 261 deaths linked to riverbed sand mining in the eleven months from April 2022 to February 2023. Most were not murders: 135 people died in crashes involving sand trucks, 54 in accidents at mining sites and 50 drowned in abandoned mining pits. Another 22 were killed in attacks or clashes, and the group recorded 70 incidents in which officials were attacked or had to flee. It calls its figures indicative and says the true toll could be much higher.
Myth Check: the US$350 billion black market
Two claims circulate in almost every article about the sand crisis: that the world is running out of sand, and that the illegal sand trade is worth US$200 billion to US$350 billion a year. The first is misleading and the second is unproven.
On the first, the USGS is clear that sand and gravel are plentiful in aggregate. What is scarce is sand of the right grade, close to where it is needed, that can be lifted legally without wrecking a river or a beach. On the second, the figure traces to a single estimate attributed to Luis Fernando Ramadon, a Brazilian federal police specialist, reported by Scientific American; we could find no published method behind it. Other experts quoted there put the legal trade at around US$100 billion a year, while a figure based on USGS data put it as high as US$785 billion, and Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity recorded only about US$1.9 billion of international sand imports in 2018, because most sand never crosses a border. Nobody knows how large the illegal market is; its effects are better documented than its value.
The Caribbean: islands that sell their beaches
On small islands the cheapest sand is usually on the beach, and the beach is also the tourism product, the storm barrier and the turtle nesting ground. In May 2018, St Vincent and the Grenadines’ Minister of Works, Senator Julian Francis, told a press conference, as reported by iWitness News, that Dominica, St Lucia, Grenada and other members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States had banned beach sand mining, and that his government was preparing to stop mining at Diamond, where about 48,000 cubic yards a month had been taken and which he said was down to rock bottom.
His numbers explain why islands keep mining beaches. Government beach sand sold for EC$14.50 a cubic yard. Washed inland sand from Rabacca cost EC$46.40. Imported sand in Grenada was quoted at EC$181. A cargo of 4,000 tonnes from Guyana would cost US$24,000 for the sand and US$52,000 to ship, so freight was more than twice the price of the material itself.
The night they stole a beach
Jamaica supplied the region’s most famous sand story. In July 2008, an estimated 500 truckloads of sand vanished from Coral Spring in Trelawny, a stretch of beach that later accounts describe as planned for resort development. The Jamaica Observer reported that then deputy commissioner of police Mark Shields described it as a very complex scheme and suggested that some police officers may have colluded. The sand was widely believed to have been sold to other tourism properties, though that was never proven. The investigation was eventually dropped, no one was charged, and the People’s National Party opposition accused the then Jamaica Labour Party government of a cover up and demanded a full investigation.
When Harmonisation Limited, the state company holding the Government’s half of the Harmony Cove resort venture, also in Trelawny, sought security bids in 2023 for its 2,400 acre site, it asked for drones, cameras and guards partly because of concern about sand theft on the beachfront, the Gleaner reported. Under the Beach Control Act, work on the foreshore needs a licence from the Natural Resources Conservation Authority; in 2017 a Trelawny businessman and his contractor were each fined J$150,000 after admitting dredging and reclamation without one.
The rivers that ran dry of sand
Most Jamaican building sand does not come from beaches but from rivers, and the warnings are old. In December 2004 Coy Roache, then Commissioner of Mines, said the Hope River and the Rio Cobre had been so over quarried that, after ten years, they still had no sand. He framed the island’s dilemma in one sentence: sand is needed, and importing it would wipe out the earnings from bauxite.
The pattern has repeated across the island. In September 2020 the National Environment and Planning Agency served two warning notices on a permitted operator after a video showed its trucks mining sand in the Rio Grande in Portland; NEPA said it had never approved trucks in the river. In 2023 NEPA suspended the licensed operation there after receiving evidence of oil and grease in the river, and its chief executive Peter Knight told the Observer illegal miners on the river posed a greater threat than the licensee. In April 2026 Commissioner of Mines Roy Nicholson recommended halting quarrying on part of the Wag Water in St Mary, from Devon Pen to Westmoreland Bridge, for perhaps another year, because there was very little or no sand left in the river. The only licensed operator in that stretch was not working.
The Mines and Geology Division recorded 1.84 million tonnes of sand and gravel in 2019 and 1.62 million in 2023, with a low of 1.35 million in 2022. Limestone output fell from 2.86 million tonnes to 1.90 million over the same years.
Why there is no honest Jamaican sand number
Divide Jamaica’s 2023 recorded output of sand and gravel, limestone, and marl and fill, about 4.1 million tonnes in all, by the 2022 census population of 2,774,538 and the result is roughly 1.5 tonnes a person, or about 4 kilograms a day. That is under a quarter of the global average UNEP cites. Some of the gap is real, but the figure is a floor, not a measure. It counts what licensed operators declare. It cannot count sand dug from a gully at night, gravel scooped from a riverbank after a storm, or a beach trucked away a load at a time.
The official picture of the industry is itself thin. A 2017 baseline study of development minerals in Jamaica, carried out for the ACP and European Union programme with UNDP, found 330 quarries on the division’s online record but only 120 actually operating, and found environmental management systems absent in more than 98 per cent of the quarries its team observed. The Auditor General gives a population of 249 to 277 licensed quarries between 2019/20 and 2023/24, and 231 in 2024/25.
What the Auditor General found
The audit, tabled on 22 September 2026, portrays a regulator stretched thin. Four inspectors covered between 58 and 69 quarries each. In 2022/23 they completed 243 inspections against a target of 400. Of 27 quarry licence applications reviewed, 26 took longer than the 90 day standard, by between 2 and 517 days. Six quarry operators kept working after their licences expired, and in a sample of 30 quarries, 18 licences had lapsed. One mining operator continued for about six years after its lease ended.
Enforcement was the weakest link. The complaints register held 22 complaints, 15 about illegal quarrying; seven more turned up in other files. For 14 of the 15 illegal quarrying cases the auditors could not confirm that enforcement was consistently pursued. On money, two operators owed US$828,000 in royalties plus US$2.58 million in interest and penalties as at March 2026, and three mining lessees faced US$13.7 million in penalties, about J$2.2 billion, for 264.14 hectares of mined out land never rehabilitated. The security deposit mechanism was not used during the review period; four non bauxite operators had not lodged required deposits, which the division said had been relaxed to attract investment, though the auditors found no documented approval. The last documented meeting of the National Restoration Committee was on 30 June 2016.
The ministry said an action plan was under way, and the division has proposed a mobile app for citizens to report mining concerns. Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie, chief executive of the Jamaica Environment Trust, told the Gleaner she questioned whether a reporting app would help when complaints already filed had not been resolved. On 2 November the Prime Minister moved mining out of the agriculture ministry into a new Ministry of Mining and Geology under Floyd Green.
What This Means for Jamaica
The timing matters because Jamaica is rebuilding. After Hurricane Melissa, the Mines and Geology Division warned in December 2025 that sand, gravel, marl and stone dumped by the storm still belong under the Quarries Control Act, and that taking, selling or buying it without a licence can bring fines of up to J$1 million, prison, or both. Buyers can be prosecuted too. Those penalties date from amendments passed by the House in October 2014 and enacted as the Quarries Control (Amendment) Act, 2015, which raised the fine for a first offence of unlicensed quarrying from J$30,000 to up to J$1 million, and required operators to issue receipts and dispatch vouchers, and anyone carrying or buying quarry material to show proof of purchase on request.
For builders, the lesson is that sand has a legal history: a dispatch voucher from a licensed quarry protects the buyer and lets the state tell legal supply from stolen. For the Government, the choice is harder. River sand mining supports truckers and small contractors in rural parishes, and some residents argue that rivers silted by storms need to be dug out. Environmental groups answer that unregulated digging undermines bridges, drives floods and kills tourism attractions such as the Rio Grande rafting. The argument turns on enforcement, not prohibition.
There is also a strategic point. About three quarters of Jamaica is limestone, much of it high purity, according to the division. Crushed limestone can substitute for river sand in much construction, as manufactured sand does elsewhere, and a limestone value addition programme is part of the new ministry’s agenda. An island that cannot afford imported sand, as Commissioner Roache warned two decades ago, may be standing on its substitute.
A resource that is never really owned
Sand is a strange kind of property. It belongs to the state in a riverbed, to the public on the foreshore, to a licensee once it is lawfully dug, and to the homeowner once it sets in concrete. In between, it moves at night, by the truckload, through a system that relied on four inspectors to watch it. Vietnam, India and the Eastern Caribbean have learned that the cheapest sand is often the most expensive in the end.
Every house in Jamaica stands on borrowed sand. The question is whether anyone is keeping the receipt.
Method: Global figures are from UNEP’s Sand and Sustainability report (2022), its Geneva launch and Marine Sand Watch (2023); United States production and the cement table from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, with cement used as a proxy because no international sand series exists. Jamaican output is from the Mines and Geology Division’s Mining and Quarrying Sector Performance 2023; Jamaica’s 2023 cement figure is the division’s recorded cement supply and is not strictly comparable with the USGS production estimates. Per person figures were calculated by Jamaica Homes News using the 2022 census population of 2,774,538 and, for the United States, an approximate population of 340 million; they are estimates. The J$ equivalent of US$13.7 million is as reported at the time of the audit. Other sources: Government of Singapore (SG101); WWF sand budget for the Mekong Delta (2023); SANDRP (2023); the 2017 Baseline Assessment of Development Minerals in Jamaica; NEPA and Jamaica Information Service releases; the Quarries Control (Amendment) Act, 2015; Scientific American; and reporting by the Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer and iWitness News. The illegal sand trade valuation is reported as an unverified estimate.
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